Are UKIP and the BNP Blair’s ideological legacy?
Tony Blair built his success on neutralising ideological debate. The New Labour project, which is now in collapse, had two aspects and one purpose: to steal the Conservatives’ clothes, to strip Labour of its ideological commitments, and to do it all in the pursuit of power.
As Blair put it himself: “I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in, I have stripped them of their core beliefs. What keeps them together is success and power”. (Andrew Rawnsely, Servants of the People pg 195).
But the New Labour project didn’t just strip Labour of its ideology and wrong-foot the Tories to generate electoral success. It re-defined the nature of political success as occupation of the centre ground via a deliberately non-ideologically appeal to vague notions of a “Third Way”, or “community” or “progressivism”. In the process, New Labour stripped the other main parties of their ideology too.
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I’m backing voting reform
by Tom Watson MP
Labour’s first term in office was characterised by a paradoxical approach to political power. On one hand there was the biggest redistribution of power for a century through devolution and a bill of rights. Yet there was also a huge consolidation of political control of the Labour party machine tothe centre. Many believed the party was run from 10 Downing Street. Intoxicated by the euphoria of Labour in power, different strands of representation in the party – my union included – let this happen.
The more I became a willing participant in Labour’s efforts to prove the iron law of oligarchy, the more trenchant I became in the view that if working people were to retain a voice in parliament, the current system of first past the post should be defended. It was the one issue on which my union completely disagreed with the then prime minister, Tony Blair. The vehemence with which we held our views led, in part, to proposals for electoral reform being held up for a decade.
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Brown’s stitch-up: why AV is not the answer
Brown has put his great clunking feet in it again. If reports on theBBC are to be believed, Brown's new National Council on Democratic Renewal – a body that may very well meet mostly in private – is to propose that the UK adopt the alternative vote (AV) for elections to Parliament. There is apparently to be a referendum.
Quite what Brown and his wretched party – I am a former member – hope to achieve is beyond me. There is a very strong group in the party – Mandelson, Hain, Martin Linton, etc, etc – who have long argued the dubious case for AV since they think it is the "electoral reform" option that will best preserve their place in national politics; and since it will block the move towards proportional representation that will alone free Parliament from bondage to the executive. So there is a simple self-serving motive at work. But this is such a stupid gesture that I suspect that they would be happy to put the proposition to a referendum and lose, having falsely demonstrated their commitment to democratic renewal.
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We are the Social Liberalist Party
article by Anton Howes
The Social Liberalist Party is one of Britain’s youngest political parties. Its ‘front-bench’ of policy spokespersons, and the majority of its members are predominantly in their teens or twenties, but the Party still manages to include a wide spread of ages.
Part of the SLP’s mission statement is to make politics enjoyable and engaging again, committing us to informality, open-mindedness, free membership, and a willingness to not only accept criticism but to actively pursue it in order to self-improve. This requires a degree of humility at times, but that’s something that is often lacking in the self-important politicking that pervades our institutions, from Whitehall to the local council.
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The case against First Past the Post
There is a voting system that exists that tends to take away the meaning of your local MP as a representative, a system that allows a minority of MPs to greatly influence the direction of laws passed by the House of Commons, a system that encourages back room dealing and negotiations away from the public eye. That voting system is First Past the Post (FPTP).
For a long time now we, supporters of electoral reform, have spent our time defending the supposed negative aspects of good PR systems. We have to contest with the broad and misleading statements of the likes Cameron makes, and we have to defend against shoddy government spin of shoddy reviews in to the subject.
The reality is that it is now time for FPTP to be put in the dock, to try to put an end to the sort of articles that blindly make sweeping statements for FPTP. In this time of reform the narrative shouldn’t be why the PR systems are supposedly bad, but why does anyone think that FPTP is any better?
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Why I’m not voting
Many good people are urging me to vote today. But I can’t feel motivated to do so.
For one thing, I know very little about European issues. I’ve got a feeling that a key issue – the optimum distribution of power between Brussels and national governments – can be illuminated by the economics of transactions costs, social contracts and public goods. But the election campaign has not, to my knowledge, addressed this.
Indeed, no party has tried much at all.
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ERS launch ‘change’ campaign today
The Electoral Reform Society today launch a new campaign to reform our electoral system. The campaign, with its new branding, is launching in the Observer newspaper.
They also have a new site to accompany the campaign: www.voteforeachange.co.uk. ERS’s Michael Calderbank said: “The emphasis is decidedly not on the particular system (apart from general sense of more proportional), but on the need to have a referendum.”
Parliamentary reform: What would Tom Paine do?
by Edward Vallance, author
To be a successful candidate, he must be destitute of the qualities that constitute a just legislator, and being thus disciplined to corruption by the mode of entering into Parliament, it is not to be expected that the representative should be better than the man.
– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man Part the Second (1792)
The bicentenary of the death, on June 8 1809, of Thomas Paine, England’s most famous republican polemicist, falls at a time when our political leaders, and much of the media, tell us that Parliament is on the brink of a revolution. However, viewed in the context of historic radical movements, the ‘big change’ heralded by David Cameron really amounts to small potatoes.
The furore over MPs’ expenses has thrown up a number of proposals for political reform. From Gordon Brown’s call for an independent audit unit, to Alan Johnson’s proposal for a referendum on proportional representation, to Cameron’s and Clegg’s arguments for fixed-term parliaments, our politicians are suddenly all engaged in a game of ‘more radical than thou’.
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Cameron giving power to the people? Yeah right
Few revolutionary slogans are ever successfully transformed into singalong top twenty singles. But that’s the trick John Lennon pulled off with his 1971 hit ‘Power to the People’. Let’s face it, ‘Communism is Soviet Power Plus Electrification’ just doesn’t scan in quite the same way.
The title of Lennon’s ditty subsequently become the catchphrase of Wolfie Smith, leader of a small microsect in BBC comedy series that effectively satirised the far left, at a time when it did not send itself up quite as comprehensively as it manages today.
How and why the flame thence passed from Wolfie to David Cameron is beyond me. But when the leader of the Conservative Party starts promising to implement the principle demand of a seventies sitcom revolutionary, laughter is still the only tenable immediate reaction.
Labour needs open primaries, not just experience
post by Will Straw
Don Paskini set out some interesting advice last week to Labour’s so-called “next generation.” There can be little doubt that spending some time away from the Westminster bubble would be healthy for anyone considering a career as an MP. And although there have been some improvements in recent years, the House of Commons remains unrepresentative of the United Kingdom. There are too few women and people from minority ethnic groups, and probably too many lawyers and politicos.
But this does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bath water.
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Clegg lays out a sweeping plan for reform
The electoral reform arms race it seems is in full flow. Writing in the Guardian today, challenging Cameron’s supposed mantle as reformer-in-chief, the Libdem leader today lays out his 100-day plan.
“Let us bar the gates of Westminster and stop MPs leaving for their summer holidays until this crisis has been sorted out,” he says, rather dramatically.
Plus, more Labour ministers have come out in favour of electoral reform.
Here are Clegg’s reforms in brief:
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Joanna Lumley: Vote Green
Is the Green Party bandwagon gathering pace? After polls that consistently show the highest supporter numbers for a generation, the campaigner and actress Joanna Lumley has today come out in support of the party.
She tells the Evening Standard:
Caroline Lucas is a tireless campaigner in the European Parliament, staunchly defending human rights and strongly promoting greater protection for animals.
I urge you to cast a positive vote for a better future by voting Green in the European elections.
But what about these voters?
There’s a chance the crisis caused by revelations of MPs’ expenses will lead to some kind of electoral reform. Some people want this to include actively bad ideas like reducing the number of elected politicians, and there is a fierce if niche debate amongst enthusiasts of different voting systems.
But I haven’t heard much about one of the biggest problems with our democracy – that increasingly, voting is an activity which is done by older and richer people. This is a self-reinforcing process – politicians of all parties tailor their policies to appeal to those who vote, and pay less heed to those who don’t.
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Who is the government really listening to?
Wow. Strong words from David Cameron yesterday. Only six years after a national poll found that over half of us felt we had “no say over what government does”, he’s today calling for “the redistribution of power from the powerful to the powerless”.
“Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power from the elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street,” he said. But why do we feel excluded from politics?
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Preference voting is the way out of this expenses mess
Far be it from a serial ballot spoiler to dish out advice on voting, but that’s what’s coming. For all would-be reformers out there, PR has never been an easy sell. But once the dust has settled on the Telegraph’s thrilling mini-series, that could change. Because here’s a slogan that might just catch the mood: PR gives you the power to remove your MP without voting for another party.
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Cameron promises sweeping parliamentary reforms
The Guardian today features an article by Cameron promising sweeing reforms of Parliament. An accompanying story states:
In a broad-ranging article in the Guardian, Cameron declares that he would trim back the powers of the prime minister and boost the role of parliament to win back public confidence.
Here are those reforms in brief:
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A British MoveOn – 38 Degrees – launches today
I’ve hinted in the past that a British version of the progressive campaign group MoveOn.org was in the works. Well, they finally launch today. To explain briefly, MoveOn launched about ten years ago as a petition site and then became an email-based campaigning organisation, counting over 3 million people as its members in the US. It has had huge impact on politics there, and spawned a copycat in Australia called GetUp and a worldwide group called Avaaz.org (from whom Paul Hilder blogs occasionally on LC).
Anyway, the British version is called 38 degrees, not a name I’m particularly fond of, but apparently that’s the tipping-point angle at which an avalanche begins. Unsurprisingly, 38 degrees will launch with a campaign focused on electoral change.
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Letter: voting for change
This letter was published in the Observer yesterday. I signed it too.
The expense crisis reveals a nation governed by a political elite that has stopped listening and who are accountable to no one but their party machines. Too many MPs seem more interested in changing their homes than changing the world. Our society faces real problems – mass unemployment and growing poverty, the threat of climate chaos and an erosion of our civil liberties to name but three. These all require effective government working on behalf of the popular will. Yet our whole political system is close to collapse. We demand a new electoral system that makes everyone’s vote count.
On the day of the next general election, there should be a binding referendum on whether to change to a more proportional electoral system. This should be drawn up by a large jury of randomly selected citizens, given the time and information to deliberate on what voting system and other changes would make Parliament more accountable to citizens.
We demand the right to be able to vote for a change.
Advice for “Labour’s next generation”
There have been a few articles from Labour activists who have ambitions of becoming MPs, about how they would act differently if they were MPs. There’s nothing particularly wrong with what they are saying, and some of them are people who I know, like and respect.
But the idea that this is ‘Labour’s next generation’ makes me profoundly uneasy. For a start, I agree with Hopi when he writes that:
when “Labour’s next generation” put themselves forwards as voices of their community, I’d like to hear more about what the community really wants and less about the views of the next generation.
What could ‘a new politics’ look like?
The expenses scandal has superceded many recent pressing issues; turning the discussion away from politics’ structural malaise and towards the self-serving, insular & arrogant habits of our politicians. It’s in this context of disgust and despair that The Guardian has launched a series of opinion pieces on how best to conduct root and branch reform of Westminster to ensure that not only can politicians no longer claim expenses for non-existent mortgages, but to repair the damaged marriage between the public and its servants.
My own take on this question instead focuses on how it could be possible to strike a better balance between the state’s ability to anticipate and reduce threats to public safety, and the need for the public to become much closer & more involved in politics.
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